Kendel Hippolyte’s collection, night vision, wanders through themes of nature, place, history and critiques of human conditions and also of capitalism. He writes in a dramatic style, betraying his background in theatre; his poems creates a vastness and interconnectedness, even when they are so clearly afixed to a certain place and time, and by a Read More
Adam Foulds’ third novel, In the Wolf’s Mouth, is a fairly conventional war story that is elevated by understated writing but which is nevertheless insightful enough to provide some traction to a story and set of characters which might at times seem overly familiar. Essentially a war novel which follows the Allies’ advance through North Read More
Photographer Elaine Constantine’s first feature film, Northern Soul shows her passion and interest in the eponymous musical movement successfully, serving as a perfect homage to the high energy, ever changing rhythm and soulful blues we associate with the revolutionary British movement. With no star leads and a low budget, Constantine’s film has still managed to Read More
Martin Provost’s last film Séraphine (2008) demonstrated the director’s joy of writing a fictional account of Séraphine Louis, a female artist living on the fringe of French society after World War One. Now, in Violette, Provost returns to similar ground to write and direct a graceful, fictional biography of the French counter-culture novelist Violette Leduc Read More
The Touch of Time, Stewart Conn’s recently published collection, serves as a retrospective of a lifetime spent writing, concluding with a section of new poems. Ayrshire-born Conn is one of Scotland’s quiet poets who has created a steady body of work over the last 40 years, making him one of the most established and appreciated Read More
Meeting Buddha in Dumbarton is an enchanting new work from writer and artist Nikki Magennis. At once deeply personal and thematically universal, its lovely (author-designed) cover encases a varied collection of poems which deal with some grand concepts while still managing to remain grounded and sharply focused on people. Feminism and history are core topics, Read More
“What do you do with a BA in English?…” Princeton (charmingly puppeteered by Chris Tomlinson) is a bright-eyed and optimistic college graduate, pondering what to do with himself after the company for whom he has just moved to New York City suddenly “downsizes”. Unemployment turns out to be only one of a multitude of problems Read More
“Can one live a life without deception?” A screen of smoke swirling across a sparse set subtly signals the leitmotif of this little known and rarely performed Russian play by Gogol. Indeed, it was unavailable to Western audiences or readers until the late 1990s. A delightfully imaginative pre-action set, which appears to be a darkened Read More
“It’s almost shocking how little films have dealt with architecture”, reflected Wim Wenders when asked about his new collaborative project, Cathedrals of Culture in a recent article of The Independent: “overall, movies used architecture and buildings as backdrops, but failed to enter ‘their souls’, as we are now trying to do”. This is due, one Read More
One might not expect the director of Channel 4’s Big Brother zombie-drama Dead Set, or the drug–dealing crime series Top Boy, to make his debut feature film with a stark look at the subterfuge and brutality of the Irish Troubles. However, in ’71 Yann Demange proves successful in creating a surprisingly apolitical film, focusing Read More